On Saturday morning, three Colorado Army National Guard helicopters tried to land at the Wounded Knee site and were driven off.
The helicopters from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora had supposedly been invited to land at the site in South Dakota to hear from descendants of survivors of the 1890 Wounded Knee conflict in which 146 Lakota Sioux men, women and children were killed by U.S. Army Calvary soldiers.
Communique from the Black Hills South Dakota American Indian Movement follows:
To the Original Peoples of the Fourth World and all International Press Services:
At high noon today [May Day 2010] US Army helicopters of the US Seventh Cavalry air division attempted to land their Blackhawk aircraft upon Lakota Sacred Burial grounds in South Dakota. The presence of military aircraft from this unit is a sad and insulting reminder of the slaughter of more than 300 American Aboriginals on December 29,1890 when soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry gunned down more than 300 Aboriginal Minneconjou Lakota refugee children, women, infants and the elderly at what is now called Wounded Knee in South Dakota Indian Country. The military then left the bodies of their victims to decay unburied in the driving snow.
One hundred and sixty Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribal members were killed on Nov. 29, 1864, when the 1st Colorado Cavalry and 3rd Colorado Cavalry, under the leadership of Col. John Chivington, opened fire on a peaceful American Indian camp in southeastern Colorado.
